"Use the STAR model to show your skills and experience in answers to shortlisting questions or in a supporting statement as well as for interview questions."

In a moment of school-hours madness I thought of applying for a 18.5hrs/week Council 'housing service advisor' job (£24,000 pro-rata, so about £12K a year or £12.50 per hour); but once I'd logged my complete employment history (a morning's work in itself, but at least it is saved for any future applications) and got to the business part, just looking at the questions, or rather the performative STAR jumps ("Situation, Task, Action, Result" in case you were wondering) they demanded by way of answers, made me feel sick.

It might have already been like this for months or years, I can't remember, but really, candidates must now answer these bullshit questions through a designated talent show acronym? Are we no longer permitted to think for ourselves? Do they want a person to fill in their applications, or a pre-programmed AI? Maybe this is how the great robot takeover starts: design an application form no human can stomach, and then make the interview into a reverse Voight-Kampff test, to ensure that only synthetic beings can get through the recruitment process.

The job is entirely working-from-home, a virtual set-up raising issues of space and resources which will probably not be addressed in the application. And of course although this is supposedly an entry-level job, and they say you can use scenarios from home or education as well as work, their 'example' has someone describing what they do in their current role, which conveniently involves the same duties required for this post. In contrast, any experience I have of "working in a demanding, customer focused role" is from a time before Zoom and Teams and whatever other apps and buzzwords have been installed in people's brains, so I have no relevant 'situation' to impart. That is, unless I recast my daughter as a demanding customer whom I am providing with a service (although she would no doubt take issue with that).

This is not new, of course. It's just that every so often I feel a certain social/material pressure to audition for these normative roles (currently a need to improve our housing conditions, ironically), to imagine myself treading the boards as a public sector administrator: customer-focused, IT literate, one of the team. But as I get older, the twitches and glitches get more pronounced, the animosity becomes more difficult to hide, and the act becomes less and less plausible.

I have long since been excluded from these sorts of jobs, regardless of my actual skills or experience. I am moving further away from them and the world they represent. 

I am not so much a STAR as a black hole.